EXP Product Strategist, Uganda - Internal

About Educate!

Educate! works to unlock opportunity for Africa’s rapidly growing youth population by building scalable employment-focused solutions. The organization designs and delivers learning experiences that help young people in Uganda, Rwanda, Kenya, and Tanzania learn, earn, and thrive. Its work includes embedding an employment-oriented subject into secondary school and running livelihood boot camps for out-of-school youth, especially marginalized rural girls and young women.

With more than 500,000 young people reached so far, Educate! is now the largest provider of youth employment and skills services in East Africa. The team includes over 300 staff, primarily based in Africa, plus 300 volunteer youth mentors. The organization places strong emphasis on a supportive, growth-oriented culture, and many senior leaders have long tenures. Educate! has also received backing from major philanthropic partners and recognition from institutions such as the World Bank, BBC, Brookings, Al Jazeera, and others.

The organization’s long-term ambition is to create solutions that measurably improve the lives of millions of young people across Africa every year.

Role overview

This position leads strategy for a major product or priority feature within Educate!’s EXP product line. The role owns the product end to end, including strategic direction, learning agenda, design quality, and the team responsible for delivery. EXP is Educate!’s most established product and reaches 36,000 youth annually, making it a key testing ground for the organization’s broader approach to product and impact.

As Product Strategist, you will work closely with senior product and business leaders while also collaborating with design, metrics, implementation, and frontline teams. The role requires a strong evidence-based mindset, the ability to manage trade-offs in a complex delivery environment, and the judgment to evolve the product in ways that remain rigorous, scalable, and user-centered.

Expected impact

• Keep product quality high in Educate!’s most mature offering while ensuring a clear strategy and learner experience that continues to positively affect 36,000 youth each year.
• Strengthen team culture across the impact unit and frontline teams through co-creation, simpler product design, and effective collaboration.
• Generate practical, credible insights on agency and growth mindset interventions through experiments and continuous discovery.
• Support the development of a strong product team, including designers, training specialists, and the product associate.
• Shape the future of EXP through evidence-based recommendations and strategic thinking.

What you will do

Product strategy and planning

• Drive the development of EXP stage strategy by building the evidence, analysis, and options needed for investment decisions and planning within the business unit’s priorities.
• Facilitate stage retreats and quarterly planning sessions, bringing forward key trade-offs and strategic decisions for approval by senior product and business leaders.
• Maintain and regularly update core strategy tools such as the value proposition, theory of change, lean canvas, user persona, skills map, graduation criteria, risk register, and roadmap.
• Spot when assumptions no longer hold, raise them with evidence and options, and help the team move forward once a decision is made.
• Co-own the learner experience strategy with the design leader or senior designer so that design choices reflect intended outcomes.
• Lead the gender equity and safeguarding approach for EXP in line with organizational standards.
• Build and manage the cost-per-youth narrative by modeling scenario options that connect product choices to impact and financial sustainability, and prepare material for Investment Committee review.
• Own the full product strategy budget and contribute to budget-versus-actual reviews for cost-per-youth under the MD’s leadership.
• Maintain the product dashboard so that it tracks the right measures and supports real-time team decision-making.

Team leadership

• Manage, coach, and develop the design officer and Senior Product Associate through clear expectations, regular 1:1s, and growth planning.
• Run team routines such as sprint planning, check-ins, retrospectives, and retreats to embed learning and accountability into daily work.
• Work with functional leaders and the product director to resolve workload, sequencing, and capacity issues before they affect delivery.
• Provide technical direction and quality review support to the training coordinator so training outputs align with experience design standards.
• Lead recruitment and onboarding for the product team so new hires quickly understand the strategy, learning agenda, and ways of working.
• Carry out performance reviews and manage performance processes in line with organizational practices, addressing issues early and following through on development commitments.

Discovery, experimentation, and product quality

• Define and own the product learning agenda, including what needs to be learned at each stage, how evidence will be gathered, and how it will shape decisions.
• Design and oversee the evaluation plan, ensuring pilots, research, and experiments are executed well and translated into clear insights.
• Maintain a structured and usable data system that combines experiment data, monitoring inputs, and evaluation findings for team-wide decision-making.
• Track feature performance in real time, surface risks or gaps, and use insights to guide day-to-day decisions.
• Own the complete set of product build outputs, including curriculum, training manuals, learner experience blueprint, lesson timetables, assessment tools, event guidance, and print artwork, ensuring they are finished on time and to standard.
• Check design decisions against cost-per-youth expectations and delivery realities, escalating when ambitions are not feasible within constraints.
• Keep a regular feedback loop with the HoPI to compare design intent with implementation reality.
• Hold the learner experience designer and design partners accountable to agreed quality standards and the product’s theory of change.
• Document lessons learned in Confluence and other shared tools to strengthen institutional memory and decision quality.

Stakeholder alignment and implementation support

• Involve youth, trainers, impact unit leaders, the MD, and functional partners in shaping and validating product direction.
• Resolve misalignment between design, evidence, and impact before it becomes a blocker, and escalate issues beyond the Product Lead’s scope when needed.
• Keep the Director, business unit leader, and MD informed on progress, risks, and trade-offs, while creating opportunities for strategic input.
• Coordinate cross-functional workstreams across impact unit, LX, metrics, and implementation teams so execution remains aligned with product priorities.
• Represent the product in planning cycles, forums, and leadership discussions while maintaining accountability as organizational priorities shift.

Who you are

• You bring 7 to 10 years of experience in product management, programme leadership, or a closely related field, with real ownership of strategy and evidence generation.
• You have turned a product vision or impact thesis into a staged strategy, delivery roadmap, and experimentation plan, and you have used evidence to adjust direction when needed.
• You are comfortable working in dynamic settings such as NGOs, social enterprises, or fast-moving teams, and you can make sound decisions in uncertainty.
• You understand lean startup, design thinking, and agile approaches and can adapt them to the context.
• You have led and developed teams, creating a culture of learning, accountability, and direct feedback.
• You can analyze both qualitative and quantitative evidence, connect the dots, and turn insights into practical recommendations.
• You know how to design and use user research methods such as surveys, interviews, prototypes, and data analysis to answer strategic questions.
• You can coordinate across functions and manage relationships with senior leaders and other stakeholders.
• You communicate clearly in writing and speaking, making strategy, evidence, and trade-offs understandable to varied audiences.
• You show empathy and curiosity toward the needs of underserved and marginalized users.
• You are motivated by Educate!’s mission and committed to continuous improvement.
• You align with Educate!’s Five Cultural Tenets.

Additional information

Educate! encourages applications from people who are excited by the role even if they do not match every listed requirement. The organization values diverse perspectives and strongly welcomes women and candidates from all backgrounds.